The NDR could in practice comply with both elements of this requirement without difficulty provided the individual's request furnished identifying data about himself that closely corresponed to those furnished by the reporting agency in a record of his license denial or withdrawal. A search of the NDR file with mismatching query data would fail to find a record that was in the file.

As a legal and policy matter, the following points deserve mention. The NDR interprets its statute as authorizing it to provide data only to driver licensing agencies. Specific legislation might therefore be required to enable the NDR to furnish data directly to a requesting individual. (The present statute would appear not to preclude the NDR from informing an individual of the mere fact that he is, or is not, in its file.) If a request for data were made on behalf of the individual by a driver licensing agency, the NDR might properly be able to furnish the data consistent with the present statute, though it can be argued that even a licensing agency can only request an NDR report about an individual when he is an applicant for a license.

As a policy matter, it might be argued that an individual should be precluded from learning about his NDR record status on the ground that if he learned that the NDR did not have a record of some license withdrawal he had suffered, he would be free to circumvent the purpose of the NDR by making a fraudulent application, secure in the knowledge that he would not be detected. This argument might be the basis of exempting the NDR from safeguard requirement III. (2).

(3) Assure that the data are used only for the stated purposes of the system, unless the informed consent of the subject is obtained.

Adherence to this requirement by the NDR is apparently guaranteed by the strict restriction on access and use imposed by the NDR statute. That law appears to have been bent, however, in at least one instance. In a research study on the driving records of diagnosed alcoholics, the names of known alcoholics from the Maryland Psychiatric Case Register (a computer-based file of patient records from Maryland's mental-health institutions) were matched against the NDR file to determine whether clinical alcholics had lost their

licenses for drunken driving more often than non-alcoholic drivers.3 (They had-about ten times more often.) Two points deserve to be raised in mitigation: first the purpose of the study is clearly related to the promotion of traffic safety, the fundamental purpose for which the NDR exists; second, the report of the study makes it plain that the anonymity of the subjects of both registers was carefully protected. Nevertheless, use of NDR data for research purposes is outside the authorized and stated purposes of the system.

(4) Inform the individual, upon his request, about all the uses made of the information about him, including the identity of all persons and organziations involved.

This requirement would present no technical difficulty for the NDR, since a record of all matches disseminated to the States is made as a matter of routine. The passive nature of the NDR as a clearinghouse makes it very unlikely that any match report would ever be generated which did not originate in the data subject himself making an application for a license.

(5) Assure that no data about an individual are made available from the system through compulsory legal process, unless the individual has been notified of the demand.

The managers of the NDR report that there has never yet been a subpoena issued against data in the file. This probably reflects the fact that a law-enforcement agency would have much more direct access to the same information from the original court or licensing agency records. If the police wanted to fish, however, to see whether a suspect had a license withdrawal in any State, access to the NDR system could save much time and searching. In such a case, it would be a tempting solution merely to file a bogus license application through the normal channels of query. The present law does not allow this subterfuge. An amendment proposed in 1971 (H.R. 9352, 92nd Congress, 1st Session) would have allowed the

3 Rosenberg, Nathan; Goldberg, Irving D.; Williams, George W., "Alcoholism and Drunken Driving-Evidence from Psychiatric and Driver Registers," Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol, Vol. 33, No. 4 (December 1972), pp. 1129-1143.

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NDR to furnish information to a judge upon his written request, if the information were to be used for consideration in the imposition of an appropriate sentence.

(6) Maintain procedures that allow the data subject to contest the accuracy, etc., of the data and to correct or amend faulty or controversial information.

As the NDR presently operates, once a data subject has established, through having his license application erroneously rejected, that the expiration or rescission of a prior license suspension has not been properly recorded in the NDR file, the NDR management had developed procedures for working with the appropriate State officials to correct the error in its file. (These procedures could readily be made part of the public notice statement.)

Summary

In nearly 12 years of operation, the NDR has achieved a balance between the pressures of its mission to protect the public from drivers of demonstrated incompetence or irresponsibility and the need of the public to be protected from the potential excesses of an intractable computer-based dragnet. Its operational efficiency is evident in the speed and economy with which the records are searched. Its attention to the protection of the citizens is evident in the vanishingly small number of genuine complaints that arise, and in the dispatch with which those complaints are resolved.

In the NDR, this balance has evolved through a period of time that is long in comparison to the age of many computerized systems. The procedures and safeguards developed through the experience of the NDR and other well-adapted, stable systems deserve to be widely imitated in many new systems that are still in their awkward youth or even still in gestation. The fundamental purpose of the proposed safeguards of the Secretary's Advisory Committee is to distill the qualities that make the good systems good and to apply them to all systems to forestall the growth of bad ones.

Testing the proposed safeguards against the actual conditions of operation of the NDR shows that introduction of the safeguards would by no means interfere with the work of a system of demonstrable merit. Neither would the continued operation of the NDR depend on significant deviation from the safeguards. These are clear and encouraging signs that both the NDR and the safeguards may be expected to prove durable and useful.

APPENDIX E

Computerized Criminal Information and Intelligence Systems*

The application of computer technology to criminal justice information systems was recommended by the President's Crime Commission' as an important tool for improving the deployment of criminal justice resources and for keeping track of criminal offenders. The commission warned, however, that special precautionary steps would have to be taken to protect individual rights and recommended that primary control of computerized information systems be retained at the state and local levels to avoid the development of a centralized file subject to Executive manipulation.

LEAA [Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, Department of Justice] has effectively concentrated a variety of resources, including research, discretionary and block grants, in the develop

*Reprinted, with permission, from Law and Disorder III: State and Federal Performance Under Title I of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, prepared under the direction of Sarah C. Carey for the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (Washington, D.C.), 1973, Chapter II, pp. 41-49. The Acting Director of the FBI submitted comments on this paper for the record of Hearings on Nomination of Louis Patrick Gray III, before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 93rd Cong., 1st Session (1973); the comments will be found at pp. 265-268 of the Hearings.

'The President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. The Commission's report entitled, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, was published in February 1967.